15 June 2009

Posted on | June 15, 2009 | 24 Comments

15 June 2009 , originally uploaded by academichic.

Sources:

Gray tank – Hanes
Plaid button down – J.Crew
Charcoal walking shorts – Gap, remixed
Black sandals – Target, remixed a lot
Yellow bag – Garage sale find

Endnotes:

I’m reunited with Nerp! How I’ve missed my little bike! Nerp resides at my fiance’s house and since I don’t have a bike rack on my car, I have no way of transporting him* back and forth with me. But we’re together again at last! To celebrate, T. and I rode our bikes to our movie date last night. We rode to a friend’s house, where he and his girlfriend joined us on their bikes, and we all rode and chatted and savored the evening air on our way to the dollar theatre. Dottie was my inspiration for this, since she and her husband go on regular bike dates and it was as fun as she promised it would be!

Today, I’m riding Nerp around town and I’m also carrying my new/old yellow bag. This is my find from our garage sale adventure on Saturday. It’s the only thing I got and I spent a whopping One Dollar on it. I loved the yellow color, the vintage cut and spacious size of it, but it was in the most deplorable condition. The “before” shots don’t fully reveal how dirty and dingy it looked and I was about to pass it up when T. convinced me that we could clean it and give it a second chance at life.

T. suggested I mix Mr. Clean with water to dilute it and use a brush to scrub the plastic (faux-leather) exterior clean. The Mr. Clean solution worked magic, just see the difference for yourself:

Before and After:

What really got me was this clasp that looks just like the enclosures on my first school bag in the first grade. The only label on this bag is the embossed “Sears” right below the clasp. So here my question to you: Is this what one might call vintage? How do you know when something is vintage and not just old? What makes an item deserving of the “vintage” label and by what standards do you call it that? Please enlighten me!

Vintage or not, I love this cheery yellow bag and it’s large enough to hold my laptop and just the right size to fit in my bike basket. S.

*Yes, Nerp is a “he” although he may look like a ‘girl’ bike – Nerp doesn’t believe in gender-normative appearances and refuses to be bullied into looking masculine just because he identifies as such.

Category: Beltless, Our Best Flatware, Research Casual, The Short of It, Vélocouture
Tags: daily bike commute > how to clean old bags > summer style > walking shorts > yellow bag

Comments

24 Responses to “15 June 2009”

Anna
June 15th, 2009 @ 11:40 am

VERY cute bag! I once read in some fashion mag that vintage refers to clothing made from the 1920s through the 1980s, but I usually use it to describe any clothing or accessory that is clearly old but has enough style or interest to look timeless or fresh, even if it is clearly a dated piece.
Megan
June 15th, 2009 @ 11:57 am

Hey S.- Vintage is a bit of a conundrum, even to those of us who sell it professionally! Etsy.com defines vintage as anything older than 20 years- so anything made before 1989. I think this is generally accepted, though some people think it should not include the 80s. Generally speaking, things older than 100 years get the distinction of ‘antique’, often hard to find in clothing and accessories and more often found as furniture! Tags and style are great resources when trying to date an item, but really its sort a learned art form! I don’t know too much about accessories but I would guess your bag is from the 60s or 70s, back when Sears was used as a brand name rather than a store name. Anyways, love the bag, especially in that color! What a great find!
Sal
June 15th, 2009 @ 11:59 am

That bag is a fantastic score, lady. And I love your explanation of Nerp’s gender identification. Ever the scholar.
admin
June 15th, 2009 @ 12:06 pm

Hey Megan and Anna – thanks for the great pointers on what makes something vintage (or antique)! That really helps!

Megan, thanks for the tip about Sears and dating it to the 60s/70s! Now I’m intrigued and think will research this some more!

Sal, glad you got my bit of dorky academic humor ;) I couldn’t help myself. And I noticed that girl bikes tend to be referred to as “she” and male bikes as “he” online, so I thought I’d defy that a bit and make mine a “he”.

S.
Winona
June 15th, 2009 @ 12:50 pm

You look amazing (as usual!), and I can’t express in words how much I love you for writing this sentence: “Nerp doesn’t believe in gender-normative appearances.”

Totally made my day. Thanks!
Emily
June 15th, 2009 @ 1:20 pm

I love this! Cute and functional. I am also a grad student at a large midwestern university. Due to the poor state of summer funding around here, I chose not to buy a bus pass for summer term, so I will be biking A LOT. Maybe y’all could put together some tips about dressing for the 30-minute bike ride to campus and the meetings with advisers that follow it. :)

I just discovered this blog about a week ago, and it’s been fun looking through all the photos and tips. Thanks!
Dawn
June 15th, 2009 @ 1:21 pm

I love your bike’s name. My mountain bike is called Aimee. She is a girl. She looks feminine but underlying the pretty gloss lies a bike that knows she can do anything as well as any other mountain bike and does not buy into normative gender roles. ;-)
piglet
June 15th, 2009 @ 1:44 pm

Love that bag! So cute and, well yellow!
Danielle
June 15th, 2009 @ 4:26 pm

LOVE that bag!!
Aussie
June 15th, 2009 @ 4:59 pm

Oooh I love Nerp. He’s got a great personality and fights for what he believes in! Will he be blogging anytime soon?
LegacyOfPearl
June 16th, 2009 @ 2:39 am

I love this post. I will try that solution on my white bag. I am almost at the end of my 4 month academic visit to The Netherlands and I’m quite sad to part with my bike “Witte”. I can’t believe I have to give it up so soon!
Lemondropvintage
June 16th, 2009 @ 4:03 am

I agree with Megan, she did a great job explaining vintage. LOVE that bag, the color, the style… the whole shebang. With so much retro reproduction in can be harder and harder to spot the real thing, but you seem to have lucked out here!
ShopKim
June 16th, 2009 @ 6:02 am

I love the Nerp explanation! I laughed out loud at that one. Great find on the bag too. Good for you guys for seeing what it could be instead of what it was.
Trisha
June 16th, 2009 @ 6:23 am

Adorable outfit, bag and bike. I love the name “Nerp”—and support his decision to stand up against normative gender roles. :) Perhaps he and Le Peug should start a club.
Anne
June 16th, 2009 @ 7:43 am

Great find, that bag – LOVE it! As for NERP your post inspired me to use my own bike more – her name is Dagmar :-D What is better on a warm summers day than wind in your hair and sun on your cheeks while you sweep through the landscape. :-)
elyse Holladay
June 16th, 2009 @ 11:10 am

i adore this bag! yellow bags are the best.
milly
June 16th, 2009 @ 11:28 am

great find…love the bag
Sara
June 17th, 2009 @ 11:22 am

I ADORE that bag! It’s such a great size and color! Vintage or not, what a find!
Bonnie
June 17th, 2009 @ 5:35 pm

I think the only difference between “vintage” and “used” is that “vintage” stuff is marked up to 10 times what it ought to cost and sold in a fancy shop. ;)
With the gales my little boat was tossed « Let’s Go Ride a Bike
June 18th, 2009 @ 3:43 am

[...] and sensible everyday outfits. Where else can I get my fashion with a side of feminist theory and a bike who “doesn’t believe in gender-normative appearances and refuses to be bullied into looking [...]
Helen
June 19th, 2009 @ 9:57 am

My “Viva Vintage” book defines vintage as anything 30 or more years old. I believe that items that are younger than that, but which strongly exemplify the fashions of the time, can also be considered vintage.

One tip: care labels first started to appear in the 1970s, so anything with a care label is not going to be older than that. Some vintage dealers will try to remove or alter labels to pass items off as older than they are.
admin
June 19th, 2009 @ 10:04 am

Thanks, Helen!

This makes me think that my yellow bag is definitely on the older than 30 side, because there is no care label (only the embossed “sears” on the outside) and I checked and it doesn’t look like one was removed at any point either.

Great tip about the care label, this is the first I’ve heard of that, thank you!

S.
20 June 2009 - Garage Sale Saturday : academichic
June 20th, 2009 @ 11:22 am

[...] As I mentioned last Saturday, one of my favorite Summer activities is going to garage sales on weekend mornings. Fortunately, my fiance T. share this same passion and that’s how I know we’re a match made in heaven. We have the same stamina and persistence when it comes to digging through other people’s trash in order to find what we’ll deem treasures. [...]
6 October 2009 – From München, With Love : academichic
October 6th, 2009 @ 12:21 pm

[...] while ago, when I acquired this yellow bag, I asked readers how one knows when something is truly vintage. Well, this time, I know. This [...]